Tired of Tired Arguments

“Rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small,” says venture capitalist Nick Hanauer in a recent TED talk. His speech has gone viral in social media because Hanauer is a hipper version of Warren Buffet—he’s saying the same things but he invests in Amazon.com not GEICO.

The speech is light on details, but it’s actually an abridged version of an editorial he penned late last year. Both versions focus on the “rich getting richer” and how the key to making America great again is to just siphon off a small piece of their wealth—heck they won’t even notice it—and invest in the middle class.

The middle class, he claims, are the “real” job creators in the economy. How’s that? Because they’re the largest and highest-spending consumers. Businesses, after all, can’t have any revenue unless someone gives it to them. And that someone is most likely to come from the middle class.

If the middle class could become wealthier (but not too wealthy) or grow in membership, that would “set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire.” Leaving aside for the moment the glaring contradiction wherein he says that business owners are the ones hiring, Hanauer would expand the middle class by levying a 3 percent surtax on incomes above $1 million and rolling back the Bush-era tax cuts to fund “rebuilding schools and infrastructure.”

Wait, what? I read his editorial over and over again, trying to find how he would set loose the “real job creators” but that’s all he’s got. Soak the rich, give the money to the federal government, and … it’ll all just work out?

This is the same tired argument put forth by Paul Krugman, John Maynard Keynes, and Karl Marx. The rich didn’t earn their money, the true source of wealth is labor, increase demand through government spending will boost the economy. These beliefs have held sway in various guises uninterrupted for 164 years now. To quote his TED talk, “it is astounding how significantly one idea can shape a society and its policies.”

That idea’s time has passed. It is time for a new idea to take hold. An idea that is the exact opposite of Hanauer et al’s: the idea that wealth comes from man’s mind.

Hanauer’s middle-class consumer has disposable income to spend for a product from a business. Where did he get that money? Most members of the American middle class are not self-employed (i.e., not business owners) so their money comes as wages from their employers. This illustrates the thing that Krugman and his ilk ignore: there can be no employee without the employer.

Every business ever was started by someone who had a vision and the drive to achieve it. From the smallest business where the owner is working by himself to the best-funded startup, that first person—the founder—was not the janitor, the line worker, or the cashier. They owe their jobs and their livelihoods to that ambitious owner.

That is not to say that a modern, substantial enterprise could exist without the janitor, the line worker, or the cashier. But it couldn’t continue with just them or without that founder. Read any business biography and take note of the hard work the founders put in.

The way to enlarge the middle class is not to penalize their employers but to make more of them want to be employers themselves. Removing the present sting that accompanies success will go a long way towards that end: the byzantine regulations that accompany hiring along with the substantial tax burden and the looming Obamacare rules are sufficient to dissuade the ambitious employee from making the leap.

One thing I was going to mention but forgot to is that Hanauer’s solution doesn’t actually address the problem he brings up and that’s the point. It’s not about raising the poor into middle class; it’s about punishing the wealthy. And naturally the state expands.

Those who would shackle some in the name of doing good for you are really just after the shackling.

Hearing wealthy people advocate wealth redistribution reminds me of the Jews prior to the rise of Naziism who gave moral sanction and advocated the ideas of selflessness, only to end up as victims of the gas-chambers themselves. Peikoff gives an example of this in Ominous Parallels.

The human capacity for compartmentalization never fails to impress me.

In terms of the economics, what needs to be brought down is the idea that wages are paid for out of revenues. This, amongst other related false notions, is the economics used to derogate capital and savings.

The reality is that wages are paid well in advance of revenue, out of capital, as are a host of other expenditures. That capital is then replenished by revenues at a much later date upon sale of the product. This is what is meant by “the demand for goods is not a demand for labour.” Without savings then invested in both capital goods and working financial capital, there could be no fund for wages and hence no notable demand for labour – but that fact is inconvenient for statists, hence it is ignored and those who mention it are attacked in some sneering manner calculated to shut down thoughtful consideration.

Of course, Dr Ridpath is correct. Today the real enemy at root is not Keynes, Sismondi et al, but Marx, Hume and Kant. The statists would be nothing without these philosophers.

Create a political-economic-cultural landscape where, in the short-term, the only way to become wealthy is to indeed not produce anything (but rather to be politically-connected and/or willing to pass off disvalues as values), and then when the standard of living for everyone drops, blame it on “the rich” and free-enterprise as such. Brilliant.

National Security Workforce to Address ‘Intersectionality’: do you ever get the sense that you’re in a waking nightmare? Money quote from the memo: “Our greatest asset in protecting the homeland and advancing our interests abroad is the talent and diversity of our national security workforce.”

Last Week Tonight on Donald Trump: bit long, but great takedown of the Trump mythos. In a more rational political environment, this would have killed his presidential campaign. I’m not sure it’ll make any difference.

A Responsibility I Take Seriously: nominee must be “without any particular ideology or agenda” and have “a keen understanding that justice is not about abstract legal theory, nor some footnote in a dusty casebook.” I sure hope the Republicans can hold the line on his nominations.

Trigger Warnings in Annapolis: I’m not sure why I expected the service academies to be bastions of academic freedom, but I did. It’s much worse than the universities since they’re far more hierarchical.

Announcing the Twitter Trust & Safety Council: this is within their rights, of course. Given the leftist leanings of the company and its assembled Council of Goodspeech, I suspect that some groups will get a pass and some will face suppression. Chilling at any rate.